Musk Is Losing His Magic -- and Tesla Is Paying the Price -- Barrons.com

By Al Root

Tesla's post-earnings tumble was about something more ominous than an earnings miss: Its CEO, Elon Musk, is losing his golden touch.

There's no way to sugarcoat it: Tesla's second-quarter earnings report was lousy. Wednesday evening, Tesla announced a second-quarter operating profit of $398 million, down from $923 million a year ago and below Wall Street's expectations for $1.7 billion, according to FactSet. Tesla missed by $1.3 billion even after selling some 480,000 cars -- up 25%, almost 80,000 more than analysts projected -- due to a combination of weaker pricing and weaker vehicle mix, lower regulatory credit sales, rising costs, and higher research spending.

The miss, however, is the least of Tesla's problems. Whether to buy or sell the stock has never really been a decision based on fundamentals. It has always been a bet on the future and Musk's ability to see it -- and articulate it -- more clearly than anyone else. But with shares down 14% after the release, the worry is that the market has started to doubt his foresight.

"Investors are losing patience in hype followed by a lack of follow-through," says Future Fund co-founder Gary Black.

And there was plenty of hype on the earnings conference call, despite Musk sounding subdued, mentioning he was under the weather. The robo-taxi business continues to see a "very high compound growth rate," and robots will still be the "biggest product ever," he said.

The mercurial CEO even introduced a potential new business: The Megapod, essentially a small, modular artificial-intelligence data center with Tesla hardware doing much of the computing.

"We're working on what we believe is the most ambitious buildout of advanced infrastructure manufacturing capacity ever in history," he said.

Wall Street doesn't seem too worried. No analysts upgraded or downgraded shares in the immediate aftermath of the quarter, while the average price target dropped just $8 to $392, according to FactSet. That means the earnings "miss" was worth about $30 billion in market value, or less than 2% of the $1.8 trillion the Street believes Tesla should be valued at.

The analyst community also seems united in the view that Tesla is spending more now to make more down the road, and that higher spending typically squeezes profitability. Phrases like "working through a business transition," "accelerating Capex cycle necessary," and the potential for "a transformational year" are scattered throughout reports. RBC analyst Tom Narayan, for one, is excited about the opportunity in robo-taxis and humanoid robots, while saying that nothing is "fundamentally wrong with the business."

Still, the stock dropped by about seven times the price target decline on Thursday, a sign that investor confidence is starting to wane. That would be an enormous change. Musk's great gift has always been the ability to get credit for potential, and it's a big reason Tesla stock trades for roughly 175 times 2026 earnings while the rest of the Magnificent Seven trade for an average of 24 times.

Musk also runs SpaceX, the only trillion-dollar company ever valued north of 40 times sales. His vision matters to valuation, and losing the Musk premium is the biggest risk to Tesla stock. (Shares would be closer to $20 if Tesla were valued like Toyota Motor. Of course, Toyota doesn't operate AI data centers.)

"The valuation is already saying that investors are paying less attention to vehicle deliveries and more attention to whether high-margin software, autonomy, power, and eventually robot revenue arrive quickly enough to offset structurally lower auto margins," says Bill Birmingham, managing director at Rex Shares.

The solution is easy: Musk needs to show results. He has done so in the past. Tesla has sold almost 10 million electric vehicles over its history, and 1.5 million people pay for the company's Full Self Driving, or FSD, driver-assistance product. SpaceX, for its part, has reusable rockets and a broadband business generating billions in annual profits. But he has also had his misses. In 2023, he suggested that Tesla would sell 20 million cars annually by 2030, a number that looks well out of reach.

To restore balance to the Musk-verse, Tesla needs more robo-taxis more than operating income right now, or humanoid robots that will become the next high-margin revenue stream -- something, anything, that will restore Musk's narrative-shaping power to full strength.

"We have walked this Tesla tightrope before," says Canaccord analyst George Gianarikas. He still rates Tesla stock Buy, though his price target did drop by $40 to $410 after earnings. "History has taught us, betting against Elon Musk is usually a fool's errand."

Shareholders better hope history repeats.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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July 24, 2026 03:30 ET (07:30 GMT)